Screaming My Lungs Out (With Nothing to Say)

Few more character designs:

Kind of unintentional, but he turned into a sort of desperado kinda character. I think this guy has a bit of personality to him. All of the Imaginary Friends (except the baby) have those moon boot things. I really like drawing those. I think of big, fluffy snow boots I used to have when I was a kid.

I’m shooting for kind of an “outdoorsy” type look with this one… I guess sort of inspired from all those years I lived in Santa Cruz. Another thing… For whatever reason I really enjoy drawing girl hair. Something about the fluidity of the lines and what not, it’s really satisfying to get right. Not to mention that a girl with a nice head of hair makes her ten times more attractive. Anyway…

I have a problem drawing asian people… I THINK this guy looks asian, but I can’t really say for certain. What do you guys think? Oh, and for some reason, cowboy books and skinny jeans are really fun to draw… I can’t really explain it.

A’ight a few more of those character design sketches:

One of my favorite designs so far. I just kinda like the idea of a little baby “smoking” a pacifier.

First attempt at drawing a girl in this style. Not really much to say…

Weird alien thing. He’s got a strange elongated head, some sort of dog ears, cat eyes, and kind of a pig nose (somewhat unintentional). I like the ears and plan on making them a little bit expressive (like Yoda… Or my dog). I also like the fish scale 1/2 shirt thing. I always kinda wondered why Captain America wore those that weird fish scale shirt. But, I was reading a bunch of Paul Pope awhile back and he draws a lot of fish scale clothing. I dunno… I guess I felt inspired.

Um… yeah… I guess that’s all for today!

So, after a all that tweeking on the pencils… I had to figure out how I was going to do the inks.

Problem #1: How do I print the pencils out so I can ink on top of them?

Scanners are sensitive. Sometimes, when you’re scanning something in black and white, it will pick up little bits of grey and what-not on the page. Then you get strange little dots all over your scan and have to do tedious amounts of clean up. Printing my pencils created this problem where I was worried that the scanner would pick up all the pencil lines.

The solution is simple in principle… They make these pencils for illustration called “Non Repro Blue” pencils (short for Non Reproductive Blue) that are made specifically for this purpose… Not to show up in a black and white scan. Generally, I HATE to draw in blue pencil, but this “non repro blue” idea is good for, say, printing out a copy of your pencil work to ink so when you scan everything the “pencil” lines wont show. Perfect for my predicament. So, now I had to figure out how to change all my pencils into blue… Thanks, by the way, to Shaughn for helping me out.

First, I took the file with the pencils and coverted everything to CMYK mode. Then, on the Channels menu, I turned off everything except for Cyan and Black. You’ll notice everything suddenly takes a blue hue sorta like this:

I then I went to the layers menu and added another all white layer underneath the now blue pencil art layer. Then I changed the opacity of this top layer to about 50%. Then printed. It worked pretty well, it was light enough so it didn’t get read on the scanner (for the most part), but dark enough for me to still see it on the page.

Problem #2: Printing

I hate Kinkos. Well, I guess that’s not really true, but it’s a pain to go to Kinkos. There’s not really one close to my house that can handle this kind of printing. I have to drive all the way out the Emeryville (about 10-ish miles down the freeway), and it’s a hassle. Since I’m a bit of a recluse and leaving my house causes me massive amounts of discomfort, I prefer to do everything at home (plus, it really does save time). The problem with me trying to do stuff at home is that my printer isn’t really set up to print out pages larger than letter size (about 8.5 x 11). So, I was grumbling and getting ready to leave my comfortable home when I suddenly remembered, “Wait! I really only need the top two panels… I still have the pencils from the redo page! I can just ink those separate and put them together in Photoshop!” Ha HA! So, I run back to my computer, cut out the top to panels in Photoshop and print. I WANTED to print the pages on nice bristol board (my inking paper of choice), but I didn’t have any that would fit into the printer nor did I have the proper means to cut any to size. So instead I just opted for regular printer paper. I wouldn’t really recommend inking on regular printer paper, but it handled the job pretty well (although I think on my next trip to the art store I’ll pick up a few pages of 8.5 x 11 bristol). The brush inks went on smooth, but the technical pen inks got a little too fat. Still it was good enough to justify moving forward.

After I inked everything, I scanned it all in, built the page in Photoshop, did a few tweeks and voila!

This comic is done and done! Now I just have to figure out what I’m going to post for tomorrow… crud.

Recap: Page 1 sucked, I finished the other three, so now it’s time to redo page 1. I started with two versions:

I decided that there was a lot about that first page I didn’t like. So I almost completely retooled it. Panels 1-4 are totally different and number 5 is a little closer to what was dictated in the script. I like panel 1 because I think I did a good job drawing that microphone stand. Panel two is nice because I feel it has a little more energy than in the last page. Panel three has a little clearer shot of our main character. Panel four, however, was a pain, and the reason why there’s two versions of this page. I first redrew panel four as this moody sort of picture that kinda hints at potential violence. The original script wanted it to be a pretty explicit picture of someone getting beat by prison guards. So, I drew a second version and figure, “Let the editor decide”. I sent in both versions of the page aaaaaand…

The editor wanted panels 1-4 from the ORIGINAL page 1 and panel 5 from this page. Oof… Now I REEEEEEEALLY didn’t like some of those panels in the original page one, specifically panels 3 and 4. I wanted to get them out of there any way possible. Thankfully, Dave Evans, the editor for FutureQuake, has gotta be the coolest editor on the planet. Super chill, super supportive and always full of great advice. It’s FANTASTIC to work with him. So, I sent Dave a mock up of the page that he wanted:

Then I basically told him, I really don’t like panels 3 and 4, can I put in the new panels three and four? And sent him a mock up of that:

He said jumped onto this last version. His exact email said, “YES! That’s the one. Aces.” So, he either really like this version of the page, or he just wanted me to leave him alone. Soooo… ACES! Done and done. Now I just have to figure out how to ink the damn thing.

Recap: I drew a strip for Li’l Depressed Boy.com. Yesterday were the pencils, so, here’s the inks:

I normally wouldn’t put this much tone into the page if I knew that it was going to get colored. See, in black and white comics things like cross-hatching and zip tones are used to denote shading, plane changes, and to control composition. When someone colors a comic, however, a lot of that shading is done in color instead of black ink, so the inker doesn’t have to try to push those gray tones quite as much (there are, of course, exceptions).

I was planning on using a more “color friendly” composition for this, but, Shaughn (Li’l Depressed Boy’s creator, writer and colorist) was enjoying the inking work I’ve been doing lately. He wanted to try to bring some of that into this page, so he asked me to draw the pages the same way I would draw a black and white page. I think the results are a little mixed.

I think the inks are definitely a little easier and cleaner to look at, but I think the colors suffered a little bit… specifically in the zip toned areas. Since the strip is shown in really low resolution on the site (probably about 72 dpi), the zip tones sort of turn into this weird plaid thing. Also, the black wall in panel six I think looks good here because the black pushes the composition. I think in the colored version, however, it looks strange that there’s a black wall in the background. In any case, I think this is a good learning experience for me and Shaughn. Art is really experimentation… sometimes the experiments don’t work out quite the way you like.

Okay, personal critique time.

Things that I DON’T like about my inks:

1) There’s an odd shadow under LDB’s belt on the viewer’s right side that probably shouldn’t be there. For that matter, that jacket that’s next to him is a little abstract as well.

2) I wish I could’ve made panel three “Pop” a little more. It feels a little muddy in terms of tone. This is one of those areas where I sorta fell back on Shaughn to clean up my mess in color.

3) LDB’s left hand (viewer’s right hand) in panel six… It feels like it’s resting on the floor when it shouldn’t, thus “pulling” the entire floor up… ugh. It’s because I drew it at bent at the wrist, so it looks like he’s supporting weight onto it. ::sigh:: Little screw up I didn’t catch until too late. Something I’d have to fix if I showed this page to an editor.

Now to make myself feel better, things I LIKE about the inks:

1) LDB’s pants in panel 1. I like the way the dry brushing really pushed the texture.

2) The shot of the Moondance Diner is great. I feel that is one of the most successful “background” shots I’ve ever drawn.

3) Panel Five… All of it. I like that the straw disappears into her hair, I like her facial expression… I just think that’s a really nice panel, but I’ve always liked drawing faces.

4) The last panel is also nice… Mostly in that I don’t feel like I screwed up anything major.

So, those posters in the background… The best we’ve got so far is two. Maybe you’ll be able to read them better in the inks. I’ll post the answers tomorrow.

Well, Wednesday is here. The day I’ve been trying to build up excitement for, but no one really cares about… Today was the day I was featured on Li’l Depressed Boy.com. Here’s the pencils:

I think I used more reference on this page than any page I’ve ever done. EVER. The first panel is a reference to a photo of John Lennon. The Moondance diner is a real place in New York (apparently). For the digital camera, I used the back of my real life digital camera. The couple in the background of panel five are Thurston Moore and Kim Norton from Sonic Youth. The girl is named, “PJ” after the actress PJ Soles from the movie Rock and Roll High School. The rock and roll posters on her wall are taken from real posters. I even looked up some photos for the milkshakes. Needless to say, there was a bit of reference work that went into this one. Thanks to Kat Cahill (the writer of the strip) for sending a bunch of those pics.
Okay, UNNECESSARY POP QUIZ TIME!
10 points to the first person to name all the bands on those rock posters. Three of them are pretty obvious, get four and I’ll be impressed, get all five, and I might die of shock (that one on the far right is pretty ambiguous). Shaughn, however is excluded because he already knows the answers.
That’s all for now. Inks will be up tomorrow.